Picture this: You’re a marketing manager at a software company. As you scroll through your feed, you find a viral Reddit thread bashing your product’s new UI update. Overnight it has created a PR crisis with angry reviews, users threatening to switch to competitors, and influencers criticizing it too. That’s the reason you need to use best news monitoring tools
This scenario is quite normal in this hyperconnected, real-time world. One negative tweet or review can harm your online reputation within hours. This is where news monitoring tools can help you spot such problems early and manage PR crises effectively.
💡 Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
However, not all news monitoring tools are created equal. Therefore, choosing the one that suits your business needs and budget can be quite daunting.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the five best news monitoring tools that can not only elevate your brand’s online reputation but also help you stay ahead of your competitors.
6 Best News Monitoring Tools
Determ
Determ is an advanced news monitoring tool that allows PR professionals to precisely track mentions and conversations about their business online.
It monitors over 100 million online sources 24/7, including news sites, social media, reviews, and more. This vast coverage allows users to track mentions across the entire web without gaps. However, such a huge amount of data can be overwhelming.
That’s why Determ applies sophisticated filters to cut through the noise. Customers can filter by location, language, search terms, domains, authors, sentiment, influence, and many other parameters. This ensures users only receive alerts and reporting on the mentions that align with their specific business goals.
Further, Determ analyzes the sentiment of every brand mention, categorizing it as positive, negative, or neutral. This provides insights into:
- How brand sentiment changes over time
- Peaks and dips in positive or negative conversations
- Sentiment differences across locations, demographics, and platforms
- Identifying pain points and praise from shifts in customer sentiment
Last but not least, Determ provides open API access to media monitoring data feeds. This allows customers to easily integrate real-time monitoring into their own platforms, systems, and tools.
Read 8 Best Practices for Doing Newsjacking the Right Way
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a well-known news monitoring tool among marketers and PR professionals. It enables users to find trending content, analyze social media engagement, identify influencers, and monitor brand mentions.
With its user-friendly interface, you can set up alerts to monitor brand mentions and keywords related to your business. It scans through millions of articles and discussions online every day. This allows you to track what customers are saying about your products or competitors online — that you’d otherwise miss. Plus, you can respond to customer feedback or address potential issues promptly.
Here’s how it helps with media monitoring:
- BuzzSumo makes it easy to track key influencers, journalists, bloggers, and publishers covering your niche. Its alerts keep you instantly updated on new content so you can react to trending stories as they are published.
- You can also keep tabs on what thought leaders are talking about your brand or niche across social channels. This helps build relationships and garner potential partnerships.
- BuzzSumo allows comprehensive monitoring of competitors’ media presence, social traction, influencer partnerships, and backlink profiles. This data provides you with insights to capitalize on trends, conversations, and gaps.
Pricing: For monitoring coverage, reach, trends, and outreach — the plan starts at $299 per month.
Brand24
Brand24 is a comprehensive monitoring tool trusted by 4,000 brands of all sizes, including Carlsberg, McCann, and Stanford. It offers a range of features to help businesses measure brand awareness, discover customer insights, and protect their online reputation.
Here’s how Brand24 can benefit your organization:
- Brand24 scans and tracks your brand mentions from 25 million online sources, including social media, videos, podcasts, reviews, blogs, etc. This real-time monitoring ensures you’re always aware of what people are saying about your brand.
- Another useful feature is customer insights. Brand24 gives you access to valuable customer insights by analyzing online conversations about your company. This helps you understand what people like or dislike about your brand or product.
Positive mentions may highlight aspects of your products or services that customers appreciate. On the other hand, negative mentions can reveal pain points or areas where improvements may be needed. Identifying these can guide your efforts to enhance product quality, customer service, or other business aspects to better meet customer expectations.
- The best part? It utilizes artificial intelligence for more efficient and insightful analysis of online mentions — and that too in 108 languages. It identifies the language used in each mention. This helps businesses with a multilingual customer base to accurately analyze and categorize those mentions.
Pricing: The plans start at $99 per month for small agencies and go up to $499 per month for large businesses.
Read Brand24 vs Determ: Which Is The Best Media Monitoring Tool
Mention
Mention is another media monitoring tool that monitors over 1 billion sources, including websites, blogs, and social media channels. It keeps you informed about the online conversations, reviews, and comments about your brand. This extensive coverage guarantees that you’re always up-to-date with what people are talking about your products and services. By staying informed, you can gain insights into how your brand is perceived in the online community.
Further, Mention is a comprehensive tool that provides an organized system known as Mention inbox. It continually manages and updates your brand mentions into an easily managed feed. As new alerts roll in, you can categorize them as ‘priority’, ‘unread’, ‘archive’, and ‘favorites’ for more effective reporting and collaboration within your team.
Another interesting feature is ‘Advanced Alerts’ which helps you customize and improve the quality of your monitoring results. Rather than simply tracking generic brand name terms, you can craft detailed topics using the Boolean system. With up to 2,000 characters per alert, these custom combinations allow you to weed out irrelevant results. This way you can focus on the most specific mentions and conversations.
Pricing: For solos and startups, the plan starts at $41 per month. It can go up to $149 for large companies.
Read Mention vs Determ: Which Media Monitoring Tool is Better
Meltwater
In the industry for 20 years, Meltwater has grown to be one of the most powerful yet easy-to-use media monitoring tools. It helps brands make data-driven decisions regarding reputation management, product development, revenue marketing, and more.
Its features include:
- Meltwater offers unparalleled breadth in monitoring, ensuring that you don’t miss out on any information in the ever-evolving media landscape. It helps capture a vast amount of data across 270,000 global sources, including social media, print, news, and podcasts.
- Its ‘Smart Insights and Alerts’ feature acts as a filter and analyzer. This means that it takes the raw data from various sources and transforms it into meaningful and actionable insights. These insights can be trends, sentiment analysis, identifying key influencers, and potential opportunities.
Smart or real-time alerts automatically send critical real-time insights to the users. It happens in cases, such as sudden spikes in mentions, high-impact business events, or news breaks.
This keeps users up-to-date with crucial matters. Plus, it also allows them to make timely and informed decisions regarding PR and marketing strategies.
- Further, Meltwater makes it easy to compare your performance with competitors’ by keeping an eye on them in real time. You can access key metrics like reach, customer sentiment, strong spots, and brand positioning. You can also pinpoint areas where they may be facing challenges and capitalize on them.
- What makes Meltwater interesting is its shareable dashboard and comprehensive reports. These visually represent AI-powered insights into where your brand stands relative to others in your niche.
Pricing: Meltwater comes with four plans starting from essentials to enterprise. However, the actual pricing is available only when requested via a form.
Mentionlytics
Last on our list is Mentionlytics, an end-to-end solution that provides extensive monitoring capabilities across both traditional news media and social media. It helps in identifying rising trends, customer feedback, and new opportunities before they become mainstream.
What sets Mentionlytics apart is its automated news clipping service. It stores your brand mentions as images, which you can easily access at any time. This feature is particularly useful for staying up-to-date with the latest news and media coverage that may impact your business. Mentionlytics also offers a straightforward and user-friendly interface, making it suitable for both beginners and professionals.
Further, this versatile tool helps businesses in:
- Keeping a close eye on your competitors and gathering insights into their online activities and reputation.
- Discovering trending topics and discussions to inspire your content creation strategies.
- Identifying potential influencers who are discussing your products or industry.
- Quickly respond to emerging online crises or issues that may affect your brand’s reputation.
- Gaining valuable insights into your social media performance and audience sentiment.
- Providing real-time alerts during sudden volume spikes, news breaks, sentiment drops, and more.
Pricing: You can explore the tool firsthand by opting for a free trial. The paid plans start from $69 per month and can go up to $399 per month.
Read 6 Reasons Why You Should Use Media Monitoring
Conclusion
From the widely recognized BuzzSumo to the AI-powered insights of Meltwater and the versatile features of Mentionlytics — these tools offer invaluable assistance in managing your brand’s digital reputation, staying ahead of emerging trends, and making data-driven decisions.
So, whether you’re a PR pro, a marketing guru, or a business owner, choosing any one of the above-mentioned five tools can work wonders in elevating your media monitoring game and empowering your brand to thrive in the digital landscape.
If you’d like to have more success and understand your audience better, book a demo with our experts and see how Determ can help you.
Lucy Manole is a creative content writer and strategist at Marketing Digest. She specializes in writing about digital marketing, technology, entrepreneurship, and education. When she is not writing or editing, she spends time reading books, cooking, and traveling.
